ATHENS, Greece — The Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East is hardly the only waterway on President Donald Trump’s mind at the moment. While Trump and the international media may be talking about the Strait of Hormuz nonstop, the broader questions about other sea lanes and shipping waterways have very much dominated the geopolitical discussion worldwide upon Trump’s return to the White House and have been at the center of tensions between the U.S. and China, set for a worldwide primetime showdown when Trump visits Beijing in May.
A top Greek government official is dishing on how Trump and his envoy to the Hellenic Republic have outmaneuvered Chinese President Xi Jinping in the East Mediterranean by building its own U.S.-funded port after a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) connected company took over a Greek port during Trump’s first term.
Adonis Georgiadis, the current Minister of Health of Greece who also serves as the vice president of the governing party New Democracy, sat down with Breitbart News for a lengthy interview in February when Breitbart News traveled to Athens for a huge event with U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. Guilfoyle sat for a lengthy interview on stage at the Nisyros Dialogues event in Athens at the Grande Bretagne hotel hosted by Greek businessman Peter Mihalos in mid-February.
Back in 2019, in Trump’s first term in the White House, Georgiadis was Minister of Development and Investment. “At that time, COSCO had already bought the Piraeus board,” Georgiadis told Breitbart News in his office in February. “They came to my office, the ambassador they had, and they told me they wanted to buy the Elefsina shipyard.”
COSCO, Georgiadis explained, is a “China state company.”
“It’s not a private state company—COSCO belongs to the Chinese government,” he said.
The very same company, COSCO, for what it’s worth, this spring called off operations in Panama over the Panamanian government’s move to strip Chinese companies of the operations of the ports on both ends of the Panama Canal in a move viewed as retaliation against the Panamanians after Trump’s administration hailed the move and western companies are set to handle the ports until a competitive bid process plays out. Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised that move by Panama’s Supreme Court. COSCO’s move is not the only retaliation China has unleashed on Panama — the country has also, according to sources who revealed this to Breitbart News in March, threatened to detain Panamanian-flagged vessels at Chinese ports.
Georgiadis said in late 2019 he called then-U.S. Ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt, a career diplomat who served across multiple administrations, including Trump’s first term but also in the administrations of former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as well. “I told Geoffrey Pyatt, I said, ‘Geoffrey, I have a very big problem because the Chinese want to buy the shipyard and the Elefsina shipyard was the only thing that China hadn’t bought around the region,’” Georgiadis told Breitbart News. “So, I said I wanted to find an investment from the United States.”
Courtesy of Adonis Georgiadis
Pyatt organized a meeting for Georgiadis with the CEO of the Development Finance Corporation, Adam Boehler. The DFC, which launched in late 2019 in Trump’s first term, per a Congressional Research Service report, “uses financial tools to promote private investment in the economic development of less-developed countries” and “aims to support development impact, U.S. economic interests, and U.S. foreign policy.”
“I went to his office, and the first thing he told me was that DFC at that time couldn’t fund Greece because Greece was not in the countries that DFC could fund because DFC was for the underdeveloped countries,” Georgiadis recalled. So, Georgiadis pulled out his phone and played a video for Boehler of the Chinese President, Xi, visiting Greece to declare the Piraeus port as the “dragon’s head” in the region.
Xi had just visited Greece in November 2019 to declare the Piraeus Port, which Chinese company COSCO controlled, as China’s “dragon’s head” in the region. “COSCO is the dragon’s head for China in Greece,” Xi said, per a Times of London report from the visit, which is also prominently featured on the official Piraeus website.
Georgiadis told Breitbart News his case to Boehler was that while he would deal with China, when it comes to Elefsina, he preferred not to — but he had to make a choice.
“I’m not the United States of America, but I was also the Minister of Development,” Georgiadis said. “I have a bankrupt company there. If you say you don’t care, and my only offer is from China, I will give them China, right? Not because I want to, but because I have no other choice. But before I do something like that, because I believe it will be bad, see this video and decide. When he saw the video, I don’t remember, but this guy was a very smart, very worthy guy, and friend of President Trump. He said: ‘What? Can you play it again?’ I played it a second time. So he said, ‘I will find a way out.’ I said ‘Okay, I will do nothing and wait for the United States of America.’”
A month or so later, a measure was considered in Congress to amend DFC’s countries list to include Greece, and it passed on a bipartisan basis.
Shortly thereafter, in early 2020, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis traveled to the White House with Georgiadis to meet with Trump — right before the coronavirus pandemic crippled the world’s economies. Georgiadis said he saw Mitsotakis talk to Trump about the Elefsina shipyard, and explained the situation of how China was trying to buy it so it could control most of Greece’s shipping industry, and how the DFC was considering making an alternative bid from the United States to fund it. Georgiadis told Breitbart News he heard Trump directly tell Mitsotakis he would work it all out and for his ministers to work with Trump’s cabinet at the time to sort it all out.
“President Trump, in the Oval Office, told to Mitsotakis in front of me — I was there — to please tell your minister to talk with my minister to find a way out,” Georgiadis told Breitbart News. “So the next day, we went to Mr. [Wilbur] Ross’s office [at the Department of Commerce], and we made a channel between us to talk and organize how DFC will fund or buy Elefsina.”
Georgiadis said things were moving quickly at the end of the first Trump administration, but then slowed a bit during the Biden administration, but did still proceed. Upon Trump’s return to the White House, things have accelerated yet again. Now, the deal is profitable for the U.S. government and the DFC.
“The best news of all is it is a profitable investment for DFC,” Georgiadis told Breitbart News.
Guilfoyle, during her interview with Breitbart News at the Nisyros Dialogues event in Athens, highlighted the American efforts at Elefsina to undercut China at Piraeus.
“Geopolitically, Greece is very uniquely situated, and then just with the rich infrastructure with the ports,” Guilfoyle said. “So, what we were able to do with Elefsina is extremely important. That’s actual money coming out of U.S. taxpayers’ pockets — dollars to invest in your country to make sure you can have a robust energy environment.”
Late last year, Chinese officials at the Chinese embassy in Athens, per Politico, lashed out at Guilfoyle for her efforts to counter Chinese influence with American influence in Greece. A Chinese embassy spokesperson, per Politico’s report, called Guilfoyle’s comments calling Chinese investment in Greece “unfortunate” something they considered “malicious slander” and “serious interference in Greek internal affairs.”
When asked during the Nisuros Dialogues event by Breitbart News if Greece represents the front lines of the influence fight over shipping and sea lanes between the United States and China, Guilfoyle said it did. She said part of why China was able to get a foothold in Greece was because Greece did not previously have its own version of the U.S.’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — known as CFIUS for short — but that now the United States is helping allies like Greece counter this worldwide.
“That’s why I’m here. I love to get on the front line,” Guilfoyle said. “Here’s the situation. I’m here as the American ambassador to the Hellenic Republic. Every single day when I wake up in the morning, I’m going to find a way to push American interests, money, infrastructure, et cetera, to work with Greece and the rest of our allies in this region. If that means pushing back very aggressively against Chinese interests, I’m going to do that every single day, and I’m going to do it unapologetically because that is my job and it is what’s best for national security. China, they’re smart. Look, they saw the opportunity. They came into Greece. But to be fair, it was at a time where the economy wasn’t doing as well as it is here today. That was the only bidder. This is the reality. Learn the lesson of history. The only bidder at the time to go and go after Piraeus. Smartly, they went after it. Unfortunately, they were able to succeed. So what can you do about it? Well, learn the lessons and also develop what we have — and they now have legislation and best practices, develop what we have — in the United States, which is CFIUS, a review board, when foreign countries try to invest money into your country, you review. You evaluate it. It has to pass through. And there is like a deep-dive investigation. Now, they’re doing that. They didn’t have that in place then. So, there was no stopgap to prevent something like that from happening. But what’s the other alternative you can do? You can invest money and infrastructure to build up another port that can push back against those outputs from Piraeus with Chinese interests. Then you can also have a long-term plan. Who knows? Sometimes things change in the trade and in the market.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, at a recent Breitbart News event in Washington, said that China and Iran have been allies for years now — and again made the case, specifically about the Strait of Hormuz, that waterways are extremely important for global trade and the order led by the United States.
“One thing they have in common, despite their many differences, is that they don’t want to have the U.S. calling the shots in the international order,” Cotton said. “They don’t want the United States to be the dominant superpower. China wants to be that. Iran is happy to help them achieve that. One way they have done that over the years is Iran exports a lot — the lion’s share — of its black market oil to China through various means like ship-to-ship transfers and small refineries that are somewhat off the grid to help China on its huge energy needs — same thing with Venezuela by the way, too. China, in return, has helped send arms to Iran over the years. They have collaborated in various ways in the Middle East as well again to try to upset the American-led order there with Israel and with our Arab friends.”
Cotton added as well that Iran’s threats over the Strait of Hormuz are dangerous to the world, and that “we can’t allow a revolutionary terrorist regime to continue to hold one of the world’s most strategic waterways and hold all of the Middle East and increasingly all of the world at risk using in some cases Chinese technology and know-how.”
All of this makes the U.S. successfully getting its foothold at Elefsina port in Greece — which is just 12 miles away from the Chinese-controlled Piraeus port — even more important. The U.S. is finally starting to counter China on the high seas, whether it is in Panama, East Asia, the Middle East, or around Europe, like in Greece. Greece is also viewed by many as the “center of the world,” given its potential as a gateway geopolitically from the far east to the far west. It is the easternmost major European nation, and with many islands and a rich shipping commercial industry steeped in history back to ancient times — Greek ships move about 25 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) — it is no wonder why Xi thought the Chinese dragon had conquered a significant pathway to the west when he visited Piraeus to celebrate what he called the “dragon’s head.”
But that is why the U.S. countermove at Elefsina led by Trump, dating back to his first term and sealed by Guilfoyle late last year — one of her first actions as U.S. Ambassador was helping advance the project after DFC committed $125 million from the United States there — is so significant. Georgiadis told Breitbart News that Trump and the Greek government led by Mitsotakis have slain the head of the Chinese dragon.
“Of course, this is the biggest victory you have done, maybe globally for China, because it’s not Greece, it’s the gateway to Europe,” Georgiadis said. “It’s not about the local market. I mean, Piraeus port with COSCO is now the third biggest port in the European Union. So, it’s a real big gateway. If you manage to make an antagonist road there, the Belt and Road Initiative faces big damage.”
The Belt and Road Initiative, of course, is China’s geopolitical plan to build a global hegemony. Major nations that have joined it are now trying to leave it, and others have expressed regret as well.
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